They Should Add An Official Damage Meter With One Condition

[Shurrikhan]

How dare they indeed - but do you really want to know the damn hurdle into raiding? It's people. The reason why people have a hard time getting into statics is because of a logistical hurdle of performance - "Have good log or don't get in". I see it a lot when I'm staring at the multiple Primal Discords that have recruitment channels for raiding. Most of the time, people refuse to help others build themselves up to their level by providing resources or helping them understand certain things about their job. You introduce a medium that creates a bar for performance into the game, people are going to create that hurdle no matter what you do. Playing with others of comparable skill level? Sure, but it's going to be a bit before you find someone with the rating you're looking for.

Honestly, I feel like this community's use of their logs site --and, yes, due merely to how they get used, not due to fflogs itself-- is a far greater problem than parsers themselves have ever been.

The weirdest thing is when a grey parse for a given fight is seen by some as somehow worse than... no clear at all???

Some friends insisted on taking you for their sub spot despite your never being in the fight before... and then published after you, having had zero explanation of the mechanics and being unable to pick up everything from a single scan of a guide alone, died twice? Grey parse. Black mark. Good luck getting your next group.

Granted, because the whole thing isn't anonymized by default (with temporary views-permitted links or the like being facilitated as per a Google Drive file link or what have you)... any privacy is essentially a massive mark of suspicion. That could probably be improved upon in fflogs itself.

Though, again, if people just stopped thinking of a, say, grey parse as a sign of being unable to clear despite many an entirely grey parse party clearing (especially as the high end just climbs and climbs after the first week such that what was once mid-tier becomes low-tier), that wouldn't be an issue. It's not a behavior I've seen from the WoW community's use of Warcraft logs, either, which tends there to be far less 'integral' to the raiding experience.

That's not to say that we don't check our performance against others of similar gear (or other fairer comparisons facilitated on warcraftlogs compared to fflogs) for self-improvement or use the replay feature to see where we were and what was happening across a fight when we made the decisions we made (again, an area warcraftlogs does a bit better than fflogs), but gatekeeping is a distant sixth or seventh use of that site. Maybe it's just the lack of competing gear-productive content, maybe it's the comparatively ultra-scripted fight design, whatever, but that fixation has seemed rather unique to the xiv community.